My natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to ju… - Linda Sue Park

Stay calm when things are hard or not going right with you. You will get through it when you persevere instead of quitting. Quitting leads to much less happiness in life than perseverance and hope.

Stands of stunted trees. There was little to eat: a few fruits here and there, always either unripe or worm-rotten. Salva’s peanuts were gone by the end of the third day. After about a week, they were joined by more people—another group of Dinka and several members of a tribe called the Jur-chol. Men and women, boys and girls, old and young, walking, walking. . . . Walking to nowhere. Salva had never been so hungry. He stumbled along, somehow moving one foot ahead of the other, not noticing the ground he walked on or the forest around him or the light in the sky. Nothing was real except his hunger, once a hollow in his stomach but now a deep buzzing pain in every part of him. Usually he walked among the Dinka, but today, shuffling along in a daze, he found he had fallen a little behind. Walking next to him was a young man from the Jur-chol. Salva didn’t

They patched the bag again. The drilling went on.